The Ancient Paths

The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday has been referred to by many as “Holy Saturday ”.  On this day, Christ was in the tomb.  His body was implanted like a seed  in  the earth. I can imagine his disciples and friends were shocked and devastated by what happened in the  preceding  week.  Jesus entered Jerusalem in a triumphant procession with the people shouting “Hosanna ”,  now a week later or less, Jesus was dead. The King they thought would save them from th e Romans was crushed by them instead.   Holy Saturday was a day for mourning and weeping. It was not a day for Easter eggs or sugary treats. Those who knew and loved Jesus the most were hiding  for their lives and terrified of being next after Jesus to be hoisted up on a cross. The earth it self was uneasy, a s  the rocks split apart, and the sun dimmed the day before. Creation was still reeling from all of these events.  On Saturday all was quiet. The tomb seeme...

The Kingdom of God is not my dysfunction.   The Kingdom of God is not my refusal to admit I was wrong. The Kingdom of God is not my bent to do the opposite of what I set out to do. The Kingdom of God is not about me. It is easy to want something; it is another thing to obtain it. In the life we live in th is  fast-paced and consumer driven modern  world, our wants and needs become conflated. I mistake what I  desire  for what I need. I need water, food, sunlight, community, and l ove. I  don’t  necessarily need a larger TV,  the latest smart device, or the latest status symbol that our culture  uses  to signify  what success is.  I realize that  the  wants  that  I think I need  are  to make myself feel better about my defects. Status symbols can  perhaps hide  my disappointment in my wasted oppo rtunities that  I’ve  squandered.  Smart devices and endless scrolling can dis...

The Word of Faith/Prosperity Gospel is a Gnostic “manifesting” of the American ideal: prosperity, health, wealth, and power for its own sake. It takes elements of the truth that God protects and provides and makes these things the focus of Christian life. The people that preach this heresy desire power, wealth, and status. They have enormous influence on the current administration and help create a petri dish of bad elements. We trace the rise of Word of Faith's non-Christian origins from the mid-20th century to the present, and how this theology intersects with Trumpism.    Listen to the episode here:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kingdom-of-god-episode-3-poverty/id1513545970?i=1000755977503

When the Roman Empire became   Christianized in late antiquity, many people who were dissatisfied with this ma rriage of the  empire  to the faith fled to the  Egyptian  desert to find Christ. They felt that the church had been flooded with  many who had joined it to advance socially in the Roman world. In the desert there was  purity;  there was  simplicity:  the noise of  the empire  was drowned out by the silence.    This movement produced a culture, spiritual  practices , and a body of  wisdom  called “ The Sayings of the Fathers” that we can read today. It is enlightening for several reasons, but I feel  the most poignant for modern Western Christians is that when the empire and the  church , when the cross and the flag merge too much; a radical c hange is needed. Most of us cannot retreat to the desert to find Jesus, but we do live in the “desert of the real” as Morpheus from the Matrix ...